


whose hands unmake

by peatmoss



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Coping with trauma, Corvo also experienced sexual assault in Coldridge, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Lady Boyle's Last Party, Low Chaos Corvo Attano, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Past Torture, Trust, but by the skin of his teeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:07:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26690410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peatmoss/pseuds/peatmoss
Summary: When Corvo sinks his blade up deep between Lord Brisby’s ribs andtwists,he does not do it for Waverly Boyle.
Relationships: Corvo Attano & Samuel Beechworth
Comments: 7
Kudos: 50





	whose hands unmake

**Author's Note:**

> I started this just for myself at first because I couldn't express how much I disliked Lady Boyle's nonlethal elimination path and wanted an alternate outcome, but it grew into a lot more than that (and 9k words, whoa), so I figured I'd go ahead and post it. I hope you enjoy reading!

“You seem sour, Corvo,” Samuel says. “Not looking forward to spending the evening brushin’ elbows with high born folk?”

Corvo frowns, the briny breeze cool on his face and tugging at his hair. This evening it’s blowing the odor of whale and human corpses alike back to shore, towards the slaughterhouses passing in sunset-orange parallax as the boatman guides the _Amaranth_ upriver against an ebbing tide. A small blessing, but a blessing nonetheless.

“It’s Piero,” Corvo rasps out after a moment. “I’m upset with him.”

His voice is wrecked. He doubts it will ever return to how it was before his six months of hell in Coldridge, every time he speaks a reminder. He tries not to do it more than he has to.

Samuel nods gravely at the tiller. “Callista told me what you did. She appreciated you having a word with him on her behalf.”

Corvo smiles a small, wry smile and looks back out to the shoreline. The sly lilt in Samuel’s voice tells him that the old man knew “a word” meant Corvo slamming Piero against the grimy pub wall and telling him in no uncertain terms to never again peep into washrooms when they were occupied, _especially_ by young ladies. Piero had stammered apologies the whole way down the hall after Corvo released his lapels. It stood to reason that Callista had heard it all through the thin wooden door. He’s glad.

“Nearly there, Corvo,” Samuel says, pulling him back. “Keep your head down.”

He nods and pulls his hood over his hair, the brief moment of levity extinguished like a lamp run out of oil. He’s here to do yet more grim work tonight, to ruin a life and deliver retribution, and all of it perhaps with blood. The heavy weight of his mask in his hands feels like both a comfort and a curse. His heart rate is already picking up, his crooked fingers tapping an anxious beat against the iron. He flexes his marked hand just to feel the cold splintering of reality around it and hear the whispering caress of the Void as it shivers down to his cracked fingernails.

Corvo has a responsibility, driven by righteous vengeance and the abject private terror of what it means that the Outsider has deemed him _interesting_ , to make things right. For Jessamine’s memory, and for Emily’s future.

The mask clicks over his face. His blade rests, folded and taut with potential, against his palm.

The high walls and wrought iron gates of the Estate District grow larger until they eat the horizon. Light scattered on the low clouds marks where the Boyle Mansion sits beyond. It will be an incongruous riot of silks and jewels nestled in a row of otherwise dark estates, Corvo knows. An iron-fenced haven amidst the weepers and rats and the displaced poor, filled with sharp faces from a shattered past life.

Samuel eventually cuts the engine and the skiff drifts silently into the canal under cover of darkness. A shuddering explosion above stills them both and they watch, silent and breathless, as a watchman piloting a clanking, gangling terror of a machine fires an incendiary bolt and condemns another nameless weeper to a violent death on the bridge spanning the canal.

“Good grief, the Lord Regent’s pulling out all the stops for the Boyle family,” Samuel murmurs, peering up ahead through the gloom. “I didn’t think there’d be tallboys patrolling here tonight. Watch yourself, Corvo, they don’t fool around.”

Corvo’s jaw twitches – he’s seen what they can do before. He tucks his blade in his coat and takes a deep breath of briny air. Samuel steadies the boat with his hand as it knocks gently against the wall. 

“Enjoy your evening out with the folk of quality,” the boatman bids him. “Better you than me.”

“Stay safe,” Corvo murmurs with all the grace of a coal chute, and nods to Samuel as he disembarks onto the slick stone steps. 

Corvo likes Samuel. He thinks the growing connection he feels might be trust, a rare thing now. The man treats him as an equal and there’s a quiet knowing in his eyes that tells Corvo he’s seen much in his long life, not all of it pleasant. He never assumes what Corvo might be able to give in conversation either. He savors their quiet boat rides despite the anxiety and smoke they deliver him to and that clings to his skin when he returns. Samuel has seen more of the raw, strange man he’s become now than anyone else.

As always, he wants him far away from whatever might come tonight.

Corvo waits silently until he can no longer hear the purr of the skiff reversing to safety, then creeps up from the canal. His heart—and Jessamine’s, where it nestles and whispers in his breast pocket—aches for what’s become of Dunwall.

Corvo nearly laughs, cold and disbelieving, when the door guard simply examines his stolen invitation and ushers him in. It’s too easy. Whispers of morbid amusement follow him through the garden and past the heavy doors of the mansion itself. How bold, for a man to arrive dressed as the notorious Masked Felon, the dark mark on the specter’s hand even traced onto his own!

None of them see what they wish not to. Here, among shimmering drapes and feasts of shark and wine, all accompanied by the soft lilting notes of horns and a harpsichord, Dunwall’s nobles delude themselves as best they can into believing that they are safe. That nothing of true consequence has changed beyond their walled homes since the coup cut the city’s legs out from under it and the plague took hold, corpses piling up on the riverbanks. If only for a single night their names and wealth are enough to hold the world from them.

The Outsider’s words still echo through his thoughts from the shrine above the canal: _will you tear it all to pieces?_

He wants to.

Nevertheless, he grits his teeth and straightens his shoulders to mimic the noble bearing of the men around him as he mingles. He steps lightly, silent still but with wide, unguarded gestures that are a feat to force himself to use instead of the back-alley crouch and tightly coiled violence that has become his place of comfort. His nerves scream _danger_ at each unpredictable scrape of cutlery, at the erratic flickers of bright fabric moving at the corner of his eye, at the glistening of the low light across the Overseers’ silent music boxes, and yet still, _still,_ no one sees and no one thinks to stop him.

He does not deliver Pendleton’s letter to Lord Shaw, having discarded it in the gutter outside with a scowl rather than re-melting the seal. If Pendleton has a duel scheduled he can damn well sober up and show up to it himself. Corvo owes his life to the Loyalists and has shaken Dunwall to its rat-infested core according to the intelligence they share with him, but he is _not_ Pendleton’s personal errand boy. The presumption of it goes too far. 

The Ladies Boyle are infuriatingly similar in their flower encrusted masks. He invites himself upstairs to the restricted second floor to snoop, silently leaping through space to reappear behind the guards before clenching the very fabric of time around his fist and dragging at it until it obeys. It’s second nature now. He drops the men one by one with quick, vicious strikes in the taut gray stasis of the moment, then heaves their unconscious bodies into a bedroom off the hall. His mark burns with cold fire and smokes shimmering trails of unreality behind it as he moves. Corvo feels its dissonant deep-water melody thrumming in the song of his own bones and the space behind his molars.

He finds what he needs in Waverly Boyle’s room after tossing those belonging to the other two sisters: a note from Burrows and skeleton key to Dunwall Tower. Corvo recognizes the key from its shape alone, having carried one just like it on his hip every day and night for nearly twenty years. He pockets it and reads the note, then folds it delicately into his waistcoat. His hands do not shake.

Waverly Boyle’s fortune has indeed made its way, coin by heavy coin, into Burrows’ blood-soaked pockets. Fittingly, they match her outfit tonight.

  
  


Corvo forces himself to stop halfway down the stairs when he realizes he’s done nothing since exiting the suite but envision how it might feel to spill Lady Boyle’s hot viscera across her own ballroom floor. He works his jaw and takes a sobering breath.

Branding Campbell and having the Pendleton twins shipped off to suffer in their own silver mines for what they’ve done could hardly be called _mercy._ Likewise, Waverly does not necessarily need to die tonight. What matters is that she and her money are permanently out of the picture. If he can find another way, he’ll take it.

He _will._

Corvo meets the man wearing the horrid mask in the smoke-filled den soon after returning downstairs. It makes his own seem far less terrifying in comparison; perhaps even tasteful. The man draws him aside as soon as he catches sight of him with such certainty that Corvo’s hand twitches to where his blade is folded inside his coat. He cannot afford to break his stunningly bold cover, however, not now with gold-masked Overseers stationed around every corner. The grinding agony and Void-severing nausea that their ancient music brings is still fresh in his memory from Sokolov’s home. So he follows.

Cigar smoke lies heavy on Corvo’s tongue as he listens to the man speak over the piped-in party music. The dead-eyed heads of great stuffed beasts watch, judging, from the gloomy corners above.

“I’m Lord Brisby,” he says, his voice deep and smooth. He gestures as he speaks with the cigar held lax in his fingers and it traces hot orange trails through the haze. “I’m a friend of Pendleton’s. I’ve done a few favors for your cause. I know your purpose here tonight, and, well… your target is the woman I love.”

Corvo frowns. Most if not all of the people Corvo has injured and killed throughout his years of duty to the crown had family, partners, people who loved them. He knows this. It is perhaps not so shocking that Lady Boyle has taken a second lover beyond Burrows. Unfortunately, that Brisby is close with Pendleton does him no particular favors in Corvo’s eyes.

Brisby is looking at him. He realizes he’s let the silence stretch too long.

“I swear that if you bring her to me unharmed you will never hear of her again,” Brisby tries once more, bringing a hand up to twist his cufflinks. Nervous, but adamant. A smoothed-over twitchiness that implies he knows he has no actual right to request anything at all of Corvo, and that Corvo is dangerous, but has let neither of those facts deter him. “There’s a cellar directly below the kitchen. I’ll wait for you there. I’m not proud of this, but surely it’s better than seeing her killed. Her name is Waverly.”

Corvo cocks his head, considering the request. It seems to be a quiet, discrete, and remarkably efficient alternative method of achieving his task tonight. And he’s relied on people more unsavory than Brisby to do the dirty work for him in the past. He briskly nods his assent and takes a step back to turn from the room. Brisby follows, though, apparently not satisfied with his nonverbal response. 

His hand lands on Corvo’s shoulder. 

Corvo goes as taught as a tripwire. His heart hammers up to his throat and his nerves instantaneously scream violence: a vicious twist of Brisby’s arm, the crunch of his ulna shattering, a boot in the nobleman’s gut sending him flying back into the brittle glass lamp on the coffee table behind him. Instead Corvo grimaces beneath his mask and breathes in slowly, barely, _barely_ checking his instinct toward protective brutality at Brisby’s invasion of space. His fingers twitch, wanting.

“Please, I swear I won’t hurt her,” the voice behind his hideous mask urges and Brisby’s grip tightens insistently. “I’m a man of means. Just bring her to the cellar and I will keep her safe with me. Forever.”

Corvo’s blood runs cold. He does not like to be _touched._ But also-

Brisby’s nails are round and manicured and suddenly he can imagine him digging crescents into someone else’s skin like Custis Pendleton did to the courtesan at the Golden Cat in a room with smoke clinging heavy to the drapes just as it did here, calling the paid woman _Waverley, Waverley, damn you Waverley_ with spit on his teeth as he did unspeakable, violent things. And the cigar—the way Brisby pinches his cherry-red cigar brings back phantom sensations of burns on Corvo’s skin and the bruising hold of two other pairs of hands, weeks ago, callous and demanding as they pinned and held and took.

It’s all Corvo can do to slap Brisby’s hold from his shoulder and keep it at that. He’s shaking with sick-spiking adrenaline. It draws mutters from the other pair of men standing half-shadowed across the smoking room, the butt ends of their own cigars illuminating the gloom under the taxidermy gazelles. Corvo turns on his heel and storms out.

Brisby wrings his hands for a moment before glancing at Corvo’s back and taking his leave as well.

Corvo crouches back in the kitchen stairwell for a solid fifteen minutes after Brisby’s retreat, staring through the doorframe at the half-carved corpse of the spit-roasted shark like it’s his own and desperately willing the vibrating rage and deep-conditioned, heart-stopping _fear_ that the nobleman’s touch had welled in him to subside. The emotions make him feel out of control, and in a different way than his still bloody-mouthed grief for Jess. He can’t afford to be in his own head, not right now. Maybe not _ever_.

It takes the promise of blood about to break from where his nails gouge at his palms to bring him back. _Focus, Corvo._

He finds Waverly Boyle in the music room. She’s warming her back against the fire with a glass of wine and listening to a Watch officer play piano with what Corvo can only describe as condescending amusement. A small circle of guests surrounds him in the warm lantern light, apparently preferring his amateur performance to the muffled harpsichord music elsewhere. Corvo approaches her and simply waits until Waverly deigns to turn to him.

“Well? What is it?” she asks, a bit slurred. It’s her party, after all, and she apparently feels no obligation to politeness or sobriety at this point in the night.

Corvo swallows. The idea of conversation still feels raw. 

“I think I know your name,” he forces out after a long moment. He has to be certain, despite Burrows’ note. Waverly’s head tips ever so slightly, though whether at the question or its rough delivery he’s not sure.

“Really? Tell me,” she croons.

“Waverly.”

“Oh, well done.” Corvo hears the smirk. “But you’ll have to name all three of us for the cameo.”

Corvo shakes his head, dismissing the little party game he’s heard the guests complaining about. Apparently it’s _stale._ Besides, the cameo already rests in his pocket from his trip upstairs. The officer finishes his piano piece and returns to patrol, his spectators stumbling out for more drinks. The two of them are left momentarily alone beneath the grimacing golden theater mask decorating the fireplace. It reminds Corvo of an Overseer’s. 

“I’ve come with a warning. Your life is in danger tonight, as we speak. Let me help you.”

Waverly scoffs. “What on earth do you mean? With you dressed like that terrible criminal, I’d expect the opposite of help.” She’s nearly affronted, gesturing to Corvo’s clothes. “If this is one of Esma’s bad jokes-”

“It’s not. Someone wants you dead, but I can offer you a way out.”

“Why? Who sent you?” Her words are slower, suspicious now.

“There’s a City Watch skiff ready and waiting to take you to safety from the cellar. Courtesy of our mutual friend H.B.,” he lies. “Please, allow me to accompany you. We can talk further there.”

“Then why not send a watchman to fetch me?”

“Surely you’re not so naïve as to think that would be appropriately discrete.”

“And _you’re_ discrete?”

Corvo just looks at her. He doesn’t have a good answer for that one.

Waverly huffs and turns away for a long, long moment, considering. Eventually she sets her near-empty wine glass down on the mantle with a sway and a _tink._ Corvo imagines her face slowly going grim under the blood red mask as she weighs what he’s said. His jaw grows ever tighter as the seconds drag on and he starts calculating escape routes, guard positions, how many times he can hurl himself through space before his hand loses feeling from drawing too deeply on the Void. Gutting her would be quick, if he has to.

“Very well, if- if he sent you. I have no wish to die tonight,” Waverly says. She turns back, her motions tight, and offers her arm to him. “But if you’re lying, I’ll have you hanged. Follow me.”

Corvo does.

The cellar stairs are cool and clean, spared from the cloying rosewater perfume of the mansion upstairs. Corvo doesn’t realize how the scent has settled beneath his mask until he’s rid of it. He removes his arm from Waverly’s when they reach the gate at the bottom and gestures for her to unlock it. She does, and before she’s even withdrawn the key he flips out his blade and slams her back against the wall.

“Timothy Brisby,” Corvo rasps. Waverly yelps abortively and then stills, her body locking against his as he presses the edge of his sword against the soft flesh of her throat. “What is he to you?”

She stutters, swallows hard, and barely suppresses a flinch as quick-running blood wells up and slips down into the pristine white ruffle of her shirt. Her fingernails scrape and claw against the rough stone of the wall. Corvo just stares fixedly into the dark behind the eyes of her mask.

“What?” Waverly hisses, trembling with fear and rage. “Did our _mutual friend_ put you up to terrifying me, dressed like that, because he suspects I’m having an _affair?_ He already has my coin and my support in court, and more. If he thinks I’m in love with my _stalker,_ then he’s a Void damned fool! Or-” She stumbles over her words, panic edging in as she grows louder and the blood drip, drip, drips down. “Oh, spirits, who _are_ you? If you’re Brisby’s man-”

Waverly draws a deep breath to scream and Corvo shatters her mask with a single swift pommel strike to the temple. Lacquer shards spray across the landing. The force of the blow drops her sideways into his arms and he eases her down to the floor until she’s a slumped pile of red silk and jewels.

Corvo draws a thin sheen of the Void over his vision and snaps to look up the stairs for a long, tense moment. His eyes itch as the murmuring song traces faint vibrations around their sockets. The kitchen is still clear, thankfully, and no ringing of approaching boots echoes from further above. He swings around and there, deeper in the cellar, he sees the gently bobbing silhouette of a man—Brisby, no doubt—twinkling gold in what must be his skiff. He thinks of the man’s insistent grip on his arm and the lurch of his heart thundering desperately for a way out.

His stomach twists in sick, nauseating knots. Corvo looks back to Waverly, grits his teeth, and hefts her onto his shoulders.

In Coldridge, Corvo called them Snuffbox and Meatface. He never learns their real names, but he learns their footsteps. He learns their footsteps _well,_ just as he learns the clinking of a meal tray and the brusque stride of guards coming to drag him struggling from his cell for yet another excruciating visit with the men who betrayed Jessamine and Emily and turned his world into a haze of pain.

Consciousness comes like swimming through rotten seawater. Corvo’s awake before he knows exactly why, but no one has heaved his body up yet and so he takes his time on the damp concrete floor. The window to the execution yard lets in a harsh cut of electric floodlight. He’s unsure how many hours have passed since he’d been dumped back in his cell in just his trousers – the sky had been bright, then.

He finally registers that someone is striking the flat side of their sword against the bars behind him. He curls into himself further. The movement reawakens the freshest pain among many, his back on fire where Morris Sullivan had peeled strip after thin strip of skin away until Corvo couldn’t keep his balance where he hung from his wrists for the blood slipping beneath his feet.

“Hey,” Meatface calls. “Attano.”

 _Bang. Bang. Bang._ Corvo moans.

“No, no,” comes another, smoother voice. It sounds like Snuffbox, who snorts his tobacco with abandon at the table across from his cell on slow nights. “It’s _Lord_ Attano, see? Be respectful _._ ”

The two men laugh like it’s the funniest thing they’ve heard in weeks.

“It true you were fucking the Empress, _Lord Attano?”_ Meatface sneers.

Corvo ignores them. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. This is strange, though – he’s never seen Snuffbox and Meatface patrol together, much less at whatever quiet hour this presumably is. And they’ve never been a real _problem,_ like some of the others have. But then he hears the two muttering to each other over Meatface jingling his keyring and the door grinding roughly open.

A sinking feeling settles in Corvo’s stomach. Something is wrong here, out of the rhythm that Coldridge lurches along to day after day after day. He grunts and drags himself up on a trembling hand until he’s half-sitting and shuffles carefully around to face the guards, assessing them from beneath the lank strands of his overgrown hair.

Snuffbox steps in first with his barely perceptible limp, the syncopated _click-click, click-click_ of his boot heels ringing sharply through the cold air. He’s trim with thin, hard features and reeks of tobacco even here in the cell, the scent battling for dominance with piss and mold and old blood. Meatface jangles in after him, then re-locks the cell. He looks like he was punched in the face as a child and the skin and bones never quite got back where they were supposed to be. He’s burly and a full head taller than Snuffbox, too, and Corvo’s never been able to think of a better descriptor for him than just _mean._

“Hey. My friend here asked you a question,” Snuffbox goads. The two men loom over him, backlit by the lights in the hall and set glimmering where the floodlight outside bounces in to catch on their buttons and Meatface’s still unsheathed blade. Corvo bares his teeth instinctively. His heart hammers in his chest with the strangeness of the situation, but he expects pain. What else is left for him, anyway?

“You fuckin’ her? Huh?” Meatface sneers.

Snuffbox chuckles and leans down. “I bet you were. A piece like that? Couldn’t blame you. I always thought the princess looked like she had a little Serk in her.”

Corvo snarls and spits in his face. _How dare he call her-_

Snuffbox slaps him so hard and fast he thinks he blacks out for a moment. The slam of his flayed shoulders into the rough concrete brings him back quick enough, though, the bandages no help at all. Corvo howls, hoarse, and struggles to roll to his side but he’s so fucking _weak-_

Snuffbox’s mocking voice pierces through to him. “That’s _sick,_ Attano. Killing her after getting your dick wet like that. I wonder if you did it because she stopped _wanting_ it after a while. Didn’t take to her foreign lover anymore with a grown kid to handle, hm?”

Corvo’s shouts in pure rage at the mere _insinuation_ that he would ever do anything Jessamine didn’t _want,_ that he would ever hurt her like that. At least the accusations of killing her he had let cut again and again until there was nowhere left to strike, but _this-_

“Suppose it’s up to us,” Meatface interjects, “to teach a mad dog a lesson.”

And then Corvo feels a boot pressing between his legs and everything just _stops._

When Corvo arrived in Coldridge four months ago, he was incandescent with rage and hollow with grief and every single person around him became a target for his fury. It took a full week for them to beat him down until he couldn’t fight anymore, until he was too weak to protest and learned that he would hurt regardless, whether in the chair or at the whims of the guards or as a consequence of his own resistance. So he taught himself to weather the pain and curl whatever shreds remained of himself up tight in the hole the grief still ripped. He learned to conserve what strength he could to not break under Sullivan’s careful, excruciating hand as Burrows and Campbell watched and waited and smiled patiently while he came undone again and again but never as much as they wanted him to. He will die before he signs their false confession.

But this is different. This is a new horror that he is _not_ prepared for.

Meatface grinds his boot slowly upward and Corvo, fueled by sheer panic, thrashes backwards. Snuffbox is immediately on him, pinning him bodily to the filthy floor even though Corvo is so frantic that he nearly does manage to throw him off his back. Corvo looks up at the men, wild-eyed and scrabbling for purchase with his face smashed against the concrete.

“Stop,” he manages, the single word tearing rough and bloody past his vocal chords.

They don’t.

Seventeen days. Seventeen days, and he comes to know with stark certainty that the men’s fixation has nothing to do with retribution or justice or even Corvo himself. It’s about power. It’s about who they perceive Corvo to be and what he represents to them. It’s about the control that they have and that he does not.

He is not given a reason when it stops, and does not ask. But he knows why.

The world rushes in as Sullivan wrenches Corvo’s head from the basin, sending droplets of water flying across the already soaked interrogation room floor. Corvo retches and gasps for air. The torturer’s iron-strong hand rips at his scalp and he shudders against the hold, his hair sticking in long, wild strips over his face and bare shoulders. Neither of them speaks anymore, Sullivan by ability and Corvo by white-knuckled choice, making these one-on-one sessions an elaborate exercise in silent suffering.

Sullivan releases him with a grunt and Corvo slumps where he kneels by the water tank. He takes the moment to squeeze his eyes shut and just breathe, fighting past the burning in his lungs. It’s as cold as the grave in the chamber and he doubles over to try to keep warm, prevented from wrapping his arms around himself by the shackles binding them behind his back. The sloshing of water echoes cavernously off the dim walls.

When he looks up, Campbell is there - he has no idea how long he’s been watching. A silent snarl twists across Corvo’s face and he shivers violently. Campbell simply takes his half-clothed form in with a dispassionate eye. He and Burrows come to observe and whisper promises and threats more rarely now, their triumphant amusement slowly souring into displeasure, and Corvo senses that they are becoming impatient with him.

“Oh, Corvo,” Campbell sighs, just dripping with false pity. “Such unnecessary pain in your eyes. I stand ready to take your confession at any time, to unburden your spirit from the bonds of what your restless hands and lying tongue have wrought. You need only ask.”

 _Better to live a life of silence than unleash a stream of untruth,_ Corvo quotes back from the Strictures in his head, then adds, _you lying sack of shit._ A low growl starts in his throat.

“Sloppy, Morris,” Campbell chides, turning away entirely and walking out of Corvo’s view to the other man. “We cannot have his wounds fester again. He hasn’t yet made the peace he needs to accept his rites.”

Sullivan communicates _something_ , and Campbell hums.

“Not your doing? Hm.” The High Overseer’s footsteps return, circling, and Corvo shrinks and shivers harder under his now intensely critical gaze. Any closer and he thinks hysterically that he might actually try to bite Campbell because he _knows_ what the man sees and he _does not want him to._

Sullivan keeps his job because he is _good_ at torture. Flaying someone alive is easy – keeping them that way afterwards is not. Sullivan is precise, calculated, and thoughtful in his horrors. The bruises on Corvo’s neck and thighs are not thoughtful, and neither are the weeping red scratches and puffy cigar burns littering his already scarred limbs.

Campbell sighs curtly and nods to the torturer.

The moment of pause ends just as abruptly as it began. Sullivan hauls Corvo’s bound wrists up and back, forcing him to stumble forward or wrench an arm from a socket. The slam of the door behind Campbell is the last thing he hears before Sullivan plunges his head back into the basin and his world becomes water and panic and drowning once more.

Snuffbox and Meatface are gone the next night and don’t come back. Days later, as his fifth month in Coldridge draws to a close, Corvo overhears from a pair of wandering guards that the two had simply lost their solitary wing clearance and been transferred to work a different cell block.

His ever-mounting anxiety over their potential return and his desperate hope that they won’t both collapse into sheer relief. Corvo nearly weeps with it, it’s so overwhelming, while curled up and miserable and wasting away at the base of his cell’s steps. Until, at least, he thinks back to what Campbell said to Sullivan that day and realizes what actually happened. Then it becomes rage.

Corvo kicks the crack-lined wall until his knees give out and his screams of incoherent fury become pants and sobs. The reason his rapists were made to stop wasn’t that they were hurting him, or that it was against the Strictures, or that it was _wrong._ It was only because they weren’t _professional_ enough about it.

When Corvo escapes Coldridge with trembling hands and silent footsteps and clawed together shreds of dead-set will on the eve of his execution, he sets aside precious time to look for Snuffbox and Meatface. He _searches._ But, as he finally learns when he only sees the names of guards he recognizes on the day's roster in the entry hall office before blowing the gates to pieces, they both ironically have their _scheduled days off_.

And then, not two days later, Corvo has High Overseer Campbell at his mercy. The contrast is jarring.

His limbs course with unwarranted strength for a man with one foot so recently in the grave and his blood _sings_ with frigid power. Corvo has not yet had time to consider the full and terrifying implications of this. Crystallized particles of reality flash off the back of his freshly marked hand when he reaches for the Void and it feels so right as he flickers undetected through Holger Square that everything else falls away, unimportant. He sheds his mask when he finds his quarry. He wants the High Overseer to know exactly who’s come to collect.

Seeing Campbell struggle to consciousness at the last moment and realize what Corvo is going to do to him is cathartic. Corvo does, finally, quote Strictures out loud to the bastard as he raises the heretic’s brand from the fire, the words glass across his ruined throat but he forces them out anyway. _The father of a lie will suffer a punishment compounded by each person who relayed it._ Campbell pisses himself as he passes back out from the pain.

And then the rush shatters to pieces. 

He sinks to the floor, shaking, breath hitching, and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. The brand clatters hot and abandoned on the echoing floor that is all too horribly similar to the one he’d found himself broken on innumerable times over in the last half year. It’s just as well that the now ruined Campbell does not see how he reacts to the scent of freshly charred flesh. 

Corvo is not averse to killing. He _couldn’t_ be, as Royal Protector. Sometimes it’s necessary. But he had always tried to minimize it, to find other ways to neutralize or avoid a threat when he could. He knows that branding Campbell will be worse than death and yet cannot bring himself to care. A quick kill felt… too simple, for this. What would that count for on the scales of justice compared to the long arc of _consequences_ for a rat of a man like Campbell, who spoke Strictures like jewels from his mouth and then crushed each one beneath his feet as they fell? Better he be left to reap what he’s sown, the truth of what lies in his rotten heart borne clear upon his face now for all to see.

In the end, he thinks that perhaps he is glad he did not find Snuffbox and Meatface before Campbell. Unlike the High Overseer, they are not complicated: he wants to drive his blade through their skulls. If he had, he’s not entirely sure he would have been able to stop with only them.

Corvo grips Waverly Boyle where she rests slumped over his shoulder and pushes open the cellar gate, which swings shut in his wake with a quiet metallic _clang_ before he can fully catch it. He locks his jaw and pushes down the thin panic that threatens to rise once more from his chest at the sound. Brisby is there, waiting at the access channel in his damned horrible mask with a picnic set for two in the bottom of his boat. He rises eagerly when Corvo emerges silently from the gloom between racks of aging barrels and brassy stills.

“You brought her! I- I wasn’t sure you’d-” he exclaims, then swallows his sudden apprehension. He shakes his head, clearing it. “Quickly, quickly, let’s get her on board.”

Brisby steps half out of the boat to steady it as Corvo approaches, who slings her unconscious body down into it so she’s situated on her side. Lingering shards of lacquer tinkle onto the iron bottom from the hole he’d struck in her mask. Brisby crouches delicately down and slips the thing off, revealing the arched brows and small mouth of a woman entering her middle age. She looks older and worn thin, now, but Corvo remembers her face from court. Brisby strokes a thumb over her cheekbone. Corvo’s fingers twitch.

“Oh, Waverly, my love,” he murmurs, then turns to Corvo above him on the edge of the channel. “Thank you, my friend. You’ll never know how happy you’ve made me.”

Corvo stands stock still, breath heavy behind his mask. He’s barely registering the words anymore. All he sees in Brisby is Snuffbox’s trim shoulders beneath finer clothes and Meatface’s unquestioned entitlement.

“Someday she’ll learn to appreciate me,” the man continues wistfully, making his way back to the small engine. “After all, she’ll have her whole life.”

It’s all about power. This time, he’s the one who has it.

Corvo steps down into the boat.

Brisby nearly topples, caught off guard by the sudden rocking. He catches himself hard on the side of the skiff and then Corvo is there, kicking his knee out and sending him all the way down. Water sloshes from the channel to slap on the cellar floor and Brisby’s short cry echoes into the dark. He’s keening and clutching his kneecap as Corvo crouches down to settle over him, and Corvo realizes with hot satisfaction that he must have shattered it. He grabs Brisby by the throat and presses him down. The man’s manicured hands fly up to scrabble uselessly at his sleeve as he twists and kicks his good leg erratically.

“No, please!” Brisby chokes, the twitchy discomfort from upstairs now stoked mercilessly into terror. Corvo allows himself the moment to enjoy it. To imagine that Brisby is someone else beneath that mask. He feels _powerful._ He flicks out his blade and watches as Brisby comes to understand the finality of what’s about to happen to him.

“I’m _helping_ you! Fuck, please, I’m-”

“Shut up,” Corvo growls, and sinks his blade up deep beneath Brisby’s ribs and _twists._ Hot blood erupts over his hand and spatters in tiny droplets against the wool of his coat. Iron fills his nose. The man chokes and spasms and eventually goes limp, his hands slipping from Corvo’s sleeve as his life puddles red around him in the bottom of the boat.

Corvo stays there for a long, long moment heaving shaky, angry breaths. When he finally quiets and comes back to himself the blood has stopped steaming in the chilled cellar air and is merely lukewarm where it soaks against his knees.

Brisby is dead.

It had felt right. It had felt _good._ But now he has a sinking, bitter sense like he’s bitten into a firm Tyvian pear only to find the center blackened and rotted away under his teeth.

He staggers to his feet and withdraws his sword from gristle and meat and raw-edged bone with a horrible wet _shink._ Corvo looks between the two bodies, Waverly’s jacket wet and darkening as the blood creeps beneath her. He shudders and drops to the seat of the boat, as far away from them as possible. He goes to flip his blade closed but realizes fuzzily at the last moment that it’s absolutely _filthy_ , and that might damage the mechanism, so he sets it down for now. The mask comes off. Corvo closes his eyes and lets the cool air of the cellar dry the sweat from his face as he sits and breathes.

Maybe he would have thought that leaving Waverly to her fate at Brisby’s hands was fitting, once, if he couldn’t imagine all too well now what men like him did when they thought no one else was watching.

But no – it still wouldn’t have made _sense._ Campbell’s fate was nearly poetic. The Pendleton twins, too. But what would Lady Boyle’s abduction have to do with her bankrolling the coup? With the passing of coin from her to Burrows to the Knife of Dunwall to pay for Jessamine’s murder and Emily’s kidnapping? Would it not be more fitting instead to strip her of her fortune, of her house, of everything she’d ever inherited, and make her watch?

Yes, Corvo thinks. Yes, it would be. The cloying scents of roses and tobacco smoke can only keep the plague-stricken world at bay from Boyle Mansion for so long, and perhaps it’s time to shatter the façade.

Waverly Boyle groans back to consciousness just as Corvo finishes stripping Brisby’s corpse of its clothes. She raises a bemused hand to her face and shrieks, suddenly registering that the tacky substance she’s lying in is blood. Corvo ignores her for now and goes about pulling up the cooling body to heave it over onto the floor of the cellar.

Waverly scrambles back until she’s pressed up against the bow of the skiff in her shirtsleeves, eyes wild. There are a million questions left unasked in her gaping mouth as her focus darts from the corpse’s naked back to Corvo lifting it, to the bloodbath in the boat, then to the cellar itself and the faint notes of delicate music still echoing from above. Brisby lands face up on the stone with a dull, wet thud and she flinches. Her eyes meet an unreadable rictus of metal and glass that shines luminously in the low cellar lights when Corvo turns.

“You’re really _him,_ ” Waverly says, voice trembling. “The Masked Felon.”

Corvo just nods. He picks up her bloodsoaked jacket from where he’d folded it on the seat next to her shattered mask and tosses it over as well.

“Whatever you want, I can give it to you. Money? Information? Anything. I don’t care who you work for. Not Brisby, clearly.” She spits his name. “Just say it and it’s yours.”

“You don’t have anything I want.”

“W-what? Then what do you _-_ ”

“Waverly Boyle is dead,” Corvo interrupts. “She left nothing but bits of bone and silk behind when the plague rats ate her alive in the cellar.”

The woman’s watery blue eyes go wide as Corvo reaches out and sinks his fingers into the fabric of the world, the Outsider’s mark flaring frigid and bright. He drags _up._ Icy black smoke boils out across the cellar floor, eddying in strange patterns as it twists between the whiskey stills and spills off over the lip of the canal. Corvo grits his teeth beneath his mask and _pulls,_ tapping down to the dregs of his abilities until the dissonant Void-song in his skull swells and fractures and wobbles. The smoking eddies slowly solidify and Corvo is left shuddering from what he’s just done.

Waverly does not gasp – she is petrified with fear.

The cellar is full of rats. Twisting, biting, wild-eyed rats, roiling over one another in a many-tailed sea as they pack in between the walls. Some fall, splashing into the canal as their brethren kick and jostle for space at the edge. It takes them less than a split second to set upon the feast that was once Lord Brisby. Still others begin trickling onto the cellar steps as they seek footing, the sound of a thousand tiny claws over iron and stone echoing back to the skiff. Smears of glowing blue travel with them as they move through the cellar gate, tracked from pools of oil there on paws and dragging bellies. The mass of them churns as one great amorphous pack and soon it will only have one place to go: up.

A fat black rat with fresh gore caking its whiskers leaps from the canal wall to the edge of the boat, scenting blood inside. Waverly snaps from her shock and screams; Corvo kicks it off as almost an afterthought. He turns and tosses Waverly’s mask into the tempest of fur, too. It floats for only a moment before it sinks beneath the tide, subsumed.

“Boyle Mansion is a plague house now,” he growls above the cacophony. The rats are beginning to move as one, pressing out to flood upwards into the rest of the building. They leave behind a torn-apart tableau of gristle and bone and crimson fabric.

“Why? Why are you doing this?” Waverly sobs.

“I’m just helping along what your coin began six months ago,” Corvo says, hatred pushing more words from him than he’s spoken at once since he’d gathered Emily into his arms at the Golden Cat and kissed comforts into her hair. He squats low to get eye to glassy eye with the woman. “Dunwall has been festering for a long time, Waverly. It’s far sicker now without Jessamine. And you’re the rot.”

Waverly twitches and Corvo thinks, just maybe, that she knows who he is now beneath the mask.

“Leave the city,” he commands. “Do not contact your sisters or Burrows or anyone else who knows you as Waverly Boyle. If you do, I will know. If you stay, I will know. And if you ever make claim to the Boyle name again, I will know. The dead make their way alone. I don’t consider this mercy”—he sweeps his arm out in an expansive gesture—“but if you test me, know that it will _feel_ like it compared to what I will do to you then.”

Waverly is nodding frantically where she cowers, her hair wild and undone around her tear-streaked face. Corvo draws himself up to survey the now silent cellar, save for Waverly’s hiccups and sobbing and the lap of the water, and takes his time loading an incendiary bolt into his crossbow. The fishy scent of three tanks worth of whale oil sits heavy beneath the sharp odor of blood. The contents of the Boyle’s basement vault had proved useful in more ways than one, as had the rats with their scampering, oil-smeared paws as they boiled up into the manor. A lingering pair still wrestles, fur glowing faintly, over a scrap of bone in the shadows.

He aims and releases the bolt. A soft noise of despair escapes Waverly’s lips as fire rips up the stairs like a spark through a fuse. It won’t take long to fully catch, he knows, once it reaches the tinderbox of finely varnished wood and lavish drapery that is the main floor.

“Goodbye, Waverly. I trust I won’t need to see you again.”

And then he vanishes in a world-bending flash of unreality.

She shoots up, frantically searching for him as the skiff bobs from the sudden change in weight. She finds nothing. Waverley’s muttering under her breath, some mixture of curses and self-admonishments, so choked with sobs that Corvo can’t understand her from where he crouches atop a light fixture deeper in the gloom. She stumbles back to the engine, nearly falling twice from the rocking, and sets about trying to start the thing.

Smoke has begun to settle like a death shroud over the cellar by the time Waverly finally succeeds. She scrambles for the tiller and, after a few course corrections, manages to putter from the slip. If she’s smart, she’ll find two tickets on an illicit cargo steamer bound for Morley tucked away in Brisby’s coat where Corvo had left it draped on the front seat.

The blaze lights up the Estate District as though dawn has come early. Corvo watches from atop a building on the opposite side of the canal as part of the roof collapses with a great crash of sparks and cinder. _Will you tear it all to pieces?_ The Outsider had asked.

Turns out he had.

Lords and ladies mill about in the gardens, staggering out of the manor coughing from the smoke and sporting torn and bloodied clothes. Groups of straggling rats pour forth at intervals to be met with the blades of Overseers and soot-streaked guards. Not many rats survived the fire, it seems, which is just as well. The guests fared far better on the whole. The remaining two Ladies Boyle, however, speak frantically with a Watch officer who staunchly refuses to return inside.

Corvo draws a remedy from an inner pocket with trembling fingers. He downs it, grimacing at the taste but immensely grateful for the grounding strength that flows back into him and thaws the buzzing, tingling numbness that has radiated all the way up his arm from the Outsider’s mark.

He makes his way back to Samuel.

“Corvo,” Samuel greets him when he appears with a flash and a rush of wind on the skiff, relief in his expression at first and then something colder coming into it. He frowns and jerks his head. “Quite the sight, that is. We’d best be on our way.”

Corvo follows Samuel’s gesture to the flickering orange glow visible over the district walls and nods. They sit in silence until they emerge out onto the Wrenhaven proper. The water is calm and the night is chilly and quiet, save for the hum of the engine and the commotion still echoing faintly towards them from shore. He takes his mask off and runs a hand through his sweaty hair.

Usually Samuel will have said something by now, something disarming and reassuring because they both understand the pain and toil beneath all this that doesn’t need to be voiced. Corvo shifts uncomfortably and looks up to find the boatman’s form ringed in pale moonlight at the tiller. His gaze is fixed resolutely over Corvo’s shoulder. There’s a closed expression on Samuel’s face that he hasn’t seen before and realizes with a jolt that it’s disappointment, wariness, maybe even distrust. Corvo’s stomach twists.

His coat and hands are still tacky and dark with blood.

“I didn’t kill her,” he says, the ragged words tumbling out before he can stop them. “But they’ll think she’s dead.”

Samuel’s eyes flick to him.

“And the Lady Boyle’s party?”

“Most people made it out. Before the fire. Because of the rats.”

“Rats?”

“All burned, now.”

The man visibly relaxes, just a hair. “That’s good, then. I’ve got no more care for high born folk than for any other man, but no one deserves to die trapped in a blaze like that.”

Silence falls once more, the thrum of the _Amaranth’s_ engine and the slapping of water against her hull rising to fill it. Corvo registers that he’s been bouncing his heel this whole time and the urge to move suddenly becomes unbearable. He drops his mask into the skiff’s bottom with a dull thunk and strips out of his filthy coat despite the night breeze, then dips his hands over into the river and starts scrubbing. He can’t go back to Emily like this.

“Corvo,” Samuel calls, softly. He glances over, interrupted. “Something happened, didn’t it? Like at Holger Square.”

He swallows. Just shrugs noncommittally and ducks his face behind his hair. Keeps scrubbing.

Samuel hadn’t asked questions when Corvo returned that first night after taking care of Campbell. Whether it was out of deference or because he’d looked like a man about to fly into pieces, Corvo isn’t sure. But he and Samuel have been building an understanding on the Wrenhaven that he doesn’t share with the other Loyalists and Corvo realizes, now that he’d been certain for a moment that he’d lost it, how much he needs that trust. It still feels like it’s hanging from a thread.

And yet the thought of telling _anyone_ why he’d really returned covered in blood tonight makes him choke.

Samule hums, deep in thought, then speaks. “I know it ain’t my place, Corvo, but if you ever need someone to listen… I knew men who were somethin’ like you when I was in the Navy. Haunted men, men who’d seen too much. You know where to find me, just me and my old boat on the river. We’ll be here.”

Corvo leans back slowly from the edge, bracing both hands heavily on the rail and still not turning. His shirtsleeves are damp and icy rivulets of water run down over the hair and old wounds on his forearms. The Outsider’s mark glistens on his skin in the moonlight, quiet and dark. He takes a deep breath.

“I- There was a man. He was going to-” Corvo stops. “He reminded me. Of Coldridge.”

When he doesn’t continue after a long moment, Samuel breaks the pause. “Whatever he wanted, it seems like he didn’t get the chance.”

“No.” Corvo swallows and shakes his head. “I killed him.”

He hears Samuel huff quietly and catches his slow nod out of the corner of his eye.

“Did it help?” comes the question. Softly, but with steel beneath.

”I don’t know,” Corvo admits. And then he’s laughing, hysteria breaking over his tattered vocal chords. “I don’t know! _Void,_ I thought it would but I don’t _know_ , I…”

Samuel is quiet, letting him wrestle alone with his choices. Corvo is under no illusion that his hands have ever been clean, not since the moment he first gutted a man with his Guard-issued sabre in the streets of Karnaca at eighteen. Everything he’s done to get this far after escaping Coldridge has only dirtied them further and faster, layers on layers of grime. But the gulf between killing out of necessity and cold-blooded murder had seemed as wide as the Void until he’d crossed it. In the cellar, with Brisby kicking helplessly beneath him and that rush of power hammering through his body, it had been as easy as stepping over a trickle in a gutter.

He hates himself for it. What kind of man is he to raise Emily, if they get through this, if this is what’s become of him in the process?

“No,” he eventually confesses to Samuel, the answer clear. He hopes the hagfish will boil up from the riverbottom and eat his guilt where it falls with his words into the dark water. “It didn’t help. It can’t... change what happened.”

Snuffbox and Meatface are still out there, beyond his reach. He doesn’t even know their Void damned _names,_ let alone whether they’re still even in Dunwall after his escape. And here he remains regardless, a man he barely recognizes who snaps to violence at the barest brush of nerves, whose hands unmake, whose anger howls for sharp, terrible things. He’s a ghost of himself hanging desperately on to restraint with bloody, slipping fingers in a city that has already let go.

“Fuck,” Corvo mutters, and squeezes his stinging eyes shut.

“Take your time, Corvo.”

He heaves in a shuddering breath. Holds it. Lets it out. He runs a tight, grounding hand through his hair, then turns and sinks back onto the boat’s bench. He’s weary to the bone. Corvo meets Samuel’s eyes with trepidation and flashes a rueful imitation of a smile, holding out his hands and motioning to himself.

“I don’t want Emily to see me like this.”

“Here. I don’t mind the chill,” Samuel offers, shrugging off his worn jacket and holding it out. The old warmth is back in his eyes and the gentle corners of his mouth. Corvo nearly breaks at the simple gesture of trust.

“Thank you,” he manages, and takes it.

“Emily’s a good kid. Been through a lot, of course, but she’s lucky to have you looking out for her, Corvo. Not many men could be in your position and keep that gentleness you have with her. I’ll make sure you get back to her in one piece tonight. It’s not far now.”

Corvo just nods. He shoves down the voice that clamors to contradict Samuel with his myriad failures. He just can’t, right now. He’s _tired._

He knocks his head back and watches Dunwall’s moonlit shores pass by, silence cradling the two of them once more as the _Amaranth_ plies her way onward downriver under Samuel’s steady hand. The boatman adjusts his scarf and lifts his attention back to scanning the water. Corvo wraps himself deep into the oversized jacket, the scuffed lining already warmed, and thinks only of Emily. Of what she might make one day, if they get through this, from what’s been taken apart. 

Until they reach the dock, maybe it will be enough.


End file.
